I am not the festival celebrating kind… as in I love being part of it.. but I like to pretend I do it as a chore. Somehow conforming to the ritualistic nature of it always got me down. I didn’t like that it had to be done cos for generations we have been doing it and it’s a happy time, so we must do it. I would much prefer it if someone said it’s a chance to make merry and indulge ourselves. That’s all it was to me anyway. My middle class home had a mother who worked in a bank. And every year she would have applied for the diwali scheme which meant that at the time of diwali.. we all got a humungous diwali cracker package worth 3000 rupees. Every year 3000 rupees. And it had all these goodies and I used to make her exchange the sweets box for an extra box of crackers at the local shop. So we didn’t have to eat badly prepared non-traditional sweets and got to eat the yummy hot ones mom made at home, while we had more crackers to burst.
Even arguments against the noise and air pollution they caused didn’t touch a chord within me beyond a point. For in a tam bram household, very rarely did one indulge in something that was inherently wasteful. You didn’t laugh loudly, you didn’t make special dishes every week and you definitely didn’t buy new kinds of products just cos you liked the ad you saw on tv. Everything was weighed down by The Wait. We were made to wait for our first doll, first bicycle, first telephone, first television. It was ensured that every consecutive generation somehow miraculously gleaned the collective gravity of The Wait of all the previous generations. There has probably not been a single diwali when my dad and mom haven’t sat us down and told us how when they were kids they couldn’t sleep all night cos for the first time in the entire year they would get new clothes and guess what that would be – a new uniform set for school. Those were trying times and I’m sure it was rather tough growing up then.. but we didn’t care. It wasn’t our job to continue revering another’s hardship.
We wanted to burst crackers. Make some deafening noise and revel in the boundarylessness of that. No one could reprimand us for it was the nature of the ritual to make noise. We would wake up at 4 am and sit on teak wood palaghas while patti sat us down and rubbed hot oil into every pore of the body. Gleaming and slipping off red oxide floors all of us would be lined up one by one and given one pittale sombu full of hot water by patti.. and then we could use our ‘modern’ soaps and rub ourselves down. The early morning smell of manjal and nall-eNNai was heady. It told us.. it was time to celebrate. It would stay with us the whole day. Recasting our skins in new textures, the ritual changed the air around us. Suddenly malli-poo clad hair was but natural. We left our convent school sensibilities and dove right in to the traditional.
It isn’t so much the festival as the air it created – clean, sparkling, crackling and new. To be felt from the surface of our skins and radiating outwards. Like vaseline lined camera lenses in real life – or maybe my myopic eyes magically created the soft glow around everyone. It was a perfumed time, kissed by sunlight and the easy boundlessness of our innocence. Skipping along, we never knew we might need the images for nostalgia.
